Cuba’s Yoani Sánchez: What to Make of the Dissident’s World Tour

[Time]

By all accounts, the world tour of Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez, which shifts today from the U.S. to Europe, has so far proven a Buena Vista Social Club-caliber success. For those weary of the feckless, half-century-long screaming match between left-wingers and right-wingers over Cuba policy, Sánchez's spring excursion has brought a welcome breath of reason. She has parried every thrust from the Che Guevara T-shirt crowd who show up to denounce her for daring suggest that her communist island isn't the people's paradise. (She acknowledged, for example, that Cubans get free education and health care, but she pointed out that while caged birds get free water, they're still caged.) Just as impressively, she seems to have charmed the Cuban-American hardliners on Capitol Hill and in Miami, who didn't have missile crisis-grade meltdowns when she reiterated her opinion that the U.S. should drop its failed 51-year-old trade embargo against Cuba, and let Americans travel there again, so as not to let the Castro regime use such measures as excuses for its political repression and economic ineptitude. This week, an ebullient Sánchez tweeted that the opportunity to finally engage the world face-to-face instead of just in cyberspace was letting her "live the days of my dreams...Days that change your life!" (MORE: Cuban Dissident Blogger Visits White House) But will these days do anything to change Cuba? Much was made earlier this year of Cuban President Raúl Castro's decision to drop the regime's harsh travel restrictions and let even dissidents like Sánchez, 37, internationally famous for her Generación Y blog, go freely abroad—and, just as important, freely come back. Yet like every change made under Castro, 81, and like every change made under his older brother and former President Fidel Castro, 86, the travel reform was as calculated as it was momentous. Some find it remarkable watching Cuba's leading dissenter criticize the Castro dictatorship from Miami to Madrid, but Havana wouldn't have given her an exit visa if it didn't think it might get something out of this too—namely, an argument with which

Via: TIME GlobalSpin